leftism LITE

Dear WSN,

this letter is of two parts. First, I try to articulate what has been
bothering me about the "violence" discussions so far; second, I put in my 2
cents' worth re: Stalinism.

Alan Spectors writes:

|It is correct, of course, to say: "Don't take violence lightly." It is
|too easy for those in relatively comfortable places to spill the blood of
|others easily.

I agree, and this was very much part of my initial "machine gun" comment. I
also wanted to suggest, however, that there is an enormous amount of verbal 
irresponsibility going on in this discussion.  And of course here we are
talking about *talking about* spilling others' blood. This I call puerile
and, again, for lack of a better word, irresponsible. This is leftism-LITE.


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DISCLAIMER -- If this is not an accurate description of who you are and
how you think, write and act, do not take it upon yourself.
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Location: university in the U.S. or western Europe. Faculty member / 
graduate
student sits down to her/his computer in the morning. S/He looks up WSN like
petty investor looks up the Dow Jones: how is the cause of world revolution
doing today? S/He concludes that it is not doing great. [NB: I am not saying
s/he is right in that conclusion.]

At this point our hero(ine) decides that s/he has a few minutes to spare
to further the cause of world revolution. S/He hits the keys.

What follows is a series of not too well thought out comments. A lot of
language. The more inflammatory the better. Big ideas. Lenin! Stalin!! The
heat is on! We are approaching a sort of oral satisfaction already! 

The nature of that oral (or, actually, given the prevalence of fingertips
in the process, more like tactile) satisfaction is very, very similar to
the way in which tourism and the Kitsch industry work: it offers a cheap way
to enjoy exoticism without assuming any *risk*. Just like the tourist who
visits foreign places and skims the highlights of a foreign culture, and
cuisine, and bodies, without the slightest sense of responsibility for the
lives of the people who serve him with their culture, food and bodies, our
academic engages in verbal revolution at others' cost. Just like watching 
Indiana Jones, s/he enjoys the scenery and exciting action of the Marxian
language. There is indeed much, much scenery and action there. The great
advantage of course is that, once s/he got the satisfaction, tactile or
otherwise, s/he is able to return to the chores of academic life, with the
salary ten times that of her/his counterparts in the "third world" and a job
demanding one-tenth of the academic responsibility to society, specifically
to social change, the world of academic politics with all its moronic goings
on. This relates to social change in the same way as using the Playboy/girl
relates to love (NB: notice, not sex but love).

As it turns out, these are issues that many, many, many people have died
for, or because of. Therefore, the offensiveness of this discussion is
mind-boggling for those readers that have a, let's say, more grounded 
understanding of the magnitude of the situation. For those that have an
involvement in the world, beyond ownership of a few stocks or the tactile
satisfaction arising from being able to publicize a large number of enormous
words over the internet. What I have been reading for the last two weeks or
so in the world party discussion is quintessential pop-leftism: I see people
sitting at their computers and typing in some cases the most moronic,
sometines -- in the implications -- mass murderous things without the
slightest trace of any consequence for the authors themselves. People churn
out tons of inelegant, party-line formulas about armed struggle, class
violence, etc. without the slightest experience with, or sense of humility
to, just what that means. I doubt that they would do so if they had any
exposure to a society where everyone has lost someone in a war or sectarian
violence or racist elimination, if they had grown up in a city where most 
buildings have still not been renovated since ravages of war (NB:that war
which  ended fifty-four years ago). Or maybe they are indeed in possession 
of
such experience but they are insensitive to such. 

They would not speak like that if they had that experience and sensitivity,
for at least four reasons. 

First, because they would understand that violence cannot be undone. It is
not like nintendo, or the Friday evening trip to the nearest mall to get 
your
visual violence fix. It cannot be erased. 

Second, they would not speak like this because they would understand that it
is immoral to speak like that. Immoral because it is disrespectful of the
lives of other people, *even if their reference is to the undeniable, mass
violence exerted in the name of, and causally because of, global 
capitalism.*
This is so because they would instinctively feel that the idea that violence
of one kind can be ended by violence of another kind is *practically
feasible.* Only very spoiled and historically uninformed people think that.

Third, they would refrain from this language because it is just esthetically
unacceptable. It is plain ugly. Nobody who has the slightest sense of taste
would say such moronic things.

Fourth, they would refuse to speak like that because they would understand
the degree to which what they do is pseudo-action. Producing and reading the
high fluff of GLOBAL CLASS VIOLENCE, REVOLUTIONARY WAR and the like in this
generic fashion actually turns us away from important things and drains our
energy that could be used for a concrete, historical, acute, and radical
understanding of the world as it is now. This fluff is basically 
intellectual
death.

In this discussion, I have picked up no sense of modesty, no sense of
self-doubt, no sense of the qualifer "well, one does not really know for
sure".  This is what bothers me about leftism LITE, in a nutshell.

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I would also like to comment on the closely related question of what 
Stalinism is or was or has been. It is of course not the same as fascism.
The idea that the two are equitable was one of Hannah Arend's less 
attractive
intellectual projects, the entire notion of 'totalitarianism' was devised 
for
this purpose. Of course the two are not the same. 

I suggest that, in terms of the discussion here, a pretty useful quick 
summary of Stalinism is to say that it is the idea of applying or approving 
the use of "revolutionary class violence" based on an undefined, hence
arbitrarily applied, inadmissibly loose notion of class struggle. 

Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of the USSR and its satellite
states knows that a crucially tragic aspect of that history is that the
notion of class struggle was applied in an extremely undifferentiated and
arbitrary fashion. The peasant who is unwilling to contribute his land (the
object of 1000 years of peasant land hunger) to the state farm or the coop 
is
a class enemy, and so is Leon Trotsky, Laszlo Rajk, Slansky, and the other
victims of the show trials. The class enemy is the small town Protestant
church singer and the upholsterer who owns a set of 
sixty-to-eighty-years-old
tools in a 100-square-foot shack. The class enemy is the eighteen year old
student who fails to comprehend the supreme necessity of denouncing her
classmates for apparently no reason. The class enemy is the Polish
sociologist dismissed from his job due to his putatively "Jewish" parentage.
Entire peoples of the "wrong" ethnicity. The class enemy is an electrician
with an exceptional organizing talent by the name Lech Walesa. The class
enemy is the person that sits next to you in the central committee. The 
class
enemy is film directors Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Krzystof Zanussi, Andrzej Wajda,
Miklos Jancso. The class enemy is the poet who sang praises of the
exceptional qualities of the leader yesterday, but today is perhaps more
interested in writing a poem about the way sunshine reflects on his/her
lover's face. The class enemy is the worker who complains about shabby work
organization, raw material shortages or the one who says "FU" when the
Stakhanov Movement asks him/her to increse labor input by 700 percent by
tomorrow.  The class enemy is the the workers of the Lenin Metallurgical
Works in northeastern Hungary who hold out with the democratic socialist 
institutions of local participatory worker democracy called Workers' 
Councils
for years after the 1956 revolution is put down.

The class enemy is the entire society that is not ready to understand that
"we [the self-appointed vanguard party] are the world". 

Whoever owns the Kalashnikovs gets to decide what class struggle is and
who the class enemy is. That is Stalinism. 

This definition is imprecise to be sure. It is also silent about the
historicl conditions that brought Stalinism about initially (the absence
of a world socialist revolution and the practical imperatives of modernity
and state building in the USSR). It is also silent about the fact that all
other examples of mass mobilization for modernity and state building have
been violent. Much of social change has been inherently violent. But it is
still somewhat useful in pointing out that the essence of Stalinism has been
the amazing arrogance with which the self-appointed vanguard party asserts
the right to use a remarkably undifferentiated notion of class struggle to
basically eradicate all dissent, potential or actual.


Now, to conclude, let me quote Alan Spector again:

|But it is surprising that so many people posting on this network either
|utterly ignore, or too casually dismiss, the massive violence inherent in
|capitalism today, which, from the streets of Rio to the slums of Calcutta
|and Chicago, has murdered hundreds of millions of children. The sound of
|a baby needlessly dying of cholera in an imperialist-protected fascist
|police state may not ring as loudly in the ears as the sound of a
|gunshot, but I'm not sure it is any easier of a way to die.


IMHO the real problem of the idea of a world party of the antisystemic kind,
one that refuses to perpetrate and increase the violence of its enemy is
twofold:

1 Is it possible, and if yes, how, to build public power for the common
good without viciously violating the good of all individuals and groups
"contained" in the notion of the public. The two are *linked*. This is the
fine line that separates a movement that is truly unique in transcending
the limitations of all previous movements and regimes from a bunch of mass
murderers of a not-so-new kind.

2 Is it possible to build public power on a global scale that refuses to
give in to the pressures to become an oligarchy?

In other words, the twin problem as I see it is this: what kind of world 
state are we envisioning? What kind of violence will be legitimate based on
what kind of political legitimation process? Mind you, these have been the
real questions of all antisystemic movements since at least the
mid-nineteenth century, and none have come up with a practically acceptable
answer. That is what a discussion of this kind should have been about.


There are other practical problems as well (the feasibility of a global
civil society that is capable of controlling the world state, the
feasibility of a civil society in over 6700 languages, etc.), but I think 
one
won't get to those before thinking a little about the above two.

Jozsef